MEDICINE AND PREVENTION OF PLAGUE

Medical writers did not hesitate to give advice on measures to prevent plague. As discussed in the previous chapter, this was on two levels: one was related to the community, the other to the individual and to the private space around a person, whether inside their house or out of doors. Both types of advice drew upon the principle that foul smells and dirt had to be expelled, counteracted or avoided. The belief that foul airs and places were pathological was well integrated into learned medicine and popular belief, and as we have seen in chapter 4 it formed a central part of regimen, medical topography and preventive medicine in general.

The advice on measures with community-wide application differed from that addressed to the individual in that it was concerned with the government or ordering of society, and was sometimes specifically directed at magistrates and others in authority. Medical writers were not telling them anything new, for the latter were often well aware of the perceived association between stinking air, foul places and diseases such as plague. The dramatic, community-wide measures of quarantine, the shutting up of infected houses, the closing of lodging houses, inns and theatres, and the banning of fairs were ordered not by physicians but by governments and local authorities.

The overall picture is of a prevailing academic culture that provides inadequate direction and mentoring for women, thereby eroding their self-confidence. In the first years of the program, women Ph.D. students experience the entire range of disorientation delineated in the Srole anomie scale: (1) the perception that community leaders are indifferent to one's needs; (2) the perception that little can be accomplished in the society which is seen as unpredictable; (3) the perception that life-goals are receding from reach rather than being realized; (4) a sense of futility; and (5) the conviction that one cannot count on personal associates for social and psychological support.

In addition, the individual is left with the feeling that it is she who is to blame, and this exacts a severe psychic toll including doubts about competency that prevent the successful working through of problems as they arise. It is not surprising that half of the informants revealed having sought personal psychological counseling during this period.

Isolation also creates powerlessness, loneliness, and confusion which, in many cases, leads to dropping out.

In recent years the question ‘Why are there so few women in science?’ posed more than a quarter of a century ago by sociologist Alice Rossi, has been raised by her counterparts throughout the world, including the late Virginia Stolte-Heiskanen (Finland), Esther Hicks (the Netherlands), Fanny Tabak (Brazil), Mary Osborne (Germany) and Pnina Abir-Am (U.S.), among many others. Several intriguing anomalies in women's experience in science emerge from analysis of a range of contrasting national and social circumstances in the work we draw upon here. For example, female scientists and engineers in India have been found to be more productive than their male counterparts, as measured by numbers of research papers and patents produced, while Venezuelan women researchers are slightly less productive than men (Lemoine, 1994).

Women have attained greater access to higher-level positions in some southern European countries than in northern Europe (Talapessy, 1994). The nuclear family, characteristic of advanced industrialized societies, in the absence of substitute support structures, typically places a strain on women scientists. The traditional extended family, still commonplace in developing countries, provides significant support for female scientists in countries such as Brazil and Mexico.

Seeming contradictions are intertwined with unexpected findings about gender and science. Women have made the greatest gains in participation in technical fields under conditions where science is relatively low in status in comparison to other professions, for example in Turkey.

In Chapter 6, we argued that differences in the network of contacts that a person has for exchanging resources and learning – their social capital – explain why and how women students are socially isolated and limited in their opportunities to form relationships, produce science, and gain support for their careers. In Chapter 8, we extended the argument to explain the experiences of newly minted women scientists who experience many of the same biases they did as graduate students, compounding the negative effects of their graduate school relationships and laying the groundwork for a perpetuation of the status quo. In the complex and political world of science, exclusion not only decreases a person's ability to acquire the knowledge needed to build a better mousetrap, but also decreases the ability of others to learn about and adopt it.

In this chapter, we use original survey data on the social networks of men and women faculty members to further explicate our argument and show that exclusion and access measurably affect not only perceptions of difference, but also career performance.

Why are there still so few women scientists, especially at the upper levels of the scientific professions? Persisting differences between women's and men's experience in science make this question as relevant today as when sociologist Alice Rossi posed it more than three decades ago at a conference on women in science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Rossi, 1965).

The years since Rossi's groundbreaking analysis have witnessed the revival of the feminist movement and the increased entry of women into many professions. Women have become lawyers and doctors in significant numbers, albeit unevenly distributed into high and low status subfields of these professions. Despite significant advances, there is a continuing disproportionate lack of women in most scientific and engineering disciplines, especially at the upper reaches of the professions.

One such scientist, Leslie Barber, a female Ph.D. in molecular biology, decided to end her career as a research scientist shortly after being awarded the doctorate. She reflected upon the mixed experience of her male and female peers in a recent article (Barber, 1995). On the positive side, she found widespread evidence of encouragement for girls and women to pursue scientific professions from the media and from parents and teachers.

On the negative side, in comparing the career trajectories of the ten members of her graduate research group, equally divided into five men and five women, Barber noted significant differences. Whether or not the men had done well in their graduate careers, they had forged ahead in their professional lives.

‘For women there are undoubtedly great difficulties in the path, but so much the more to overcome,’ exulted Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), the first female professor of astronomy in the U.S., at the then newly founded Vassar College. More than a century later, on the 175th anniversary of her birth, women's scientific aspirations are still restricted by ‘tradition and authority’ (Enna, 1993). Few female scientists are as happy as the nineteenth century astronomer Mitchell to have put up a brave front in the face of a host of gender-related problems. Despite significant improvement, especially in the numbers of women who wish to enter scientific careers, many of the organizational structures of science, and some scientists, continue to resist women's full participation. Additional steps are necessary, beyond encouraging women to take up science, to insure that science is open to them (Lovitts, 1996).

In this final chapter, we discuss the policy implications of our findings in terms of motivators and inhibitors that shape the experiences of women and conditions of inequality in academic science. First, the arguments behind each thesis are described and its accomplishments and shortfalls reviewed. Second, we argue for new policy recommendations related to department reform, the factor that is most relevant to the organizational issues explored in the preceding chapters and that we have identified as a means by which programs for change can be implemented.

Five strategies have been suggested during the past thirty years to promote improvement of the condition of women in academic science.

SURVEY METHODOLOGY

Our survey was mailed to the faculty in the departments of biology, biochemistry, chemistry, computer science, engineering, and physics at a large private Midwestern University in May of 1997. Emeritus, adjunct, and visiting faculty members were not contacted because they are normally peripheral to department activity. Data collection was completed by September 1997. The survey was diskette-based and computer-administered and took approximately 30 minutes to complete. The electronic survey guided respondents through the items (with appropriate branching) and created a data file on the diskette, which was returned to us. This procedure reduced errors of data entry by respondents and data entry assistants, and ensured that all respondents answered all items. All faculty members were sent a cover letter that briefly described the purpose of the study, assured confidentiality, gave references to our previous work in scientific journals of the hard sciences and at the National Science Foundation, and described the instructions for the use of the survey. Included along with the cover letter were a diskette and a pre-addressed envelope for returning the diskette. Table A1 describes the characteristics of our sample.

Faculty members who did not respond in three weeks or who used Macintosh computers were asked to set up a time for a telephone interview by a trained research assistant who entered responses in real time into a PC. Unfortunately, the biology department used Macintosh computers exclusively, which lowered the response rate of this department.

At each transitional point the number of women decreases at a significantly higher rate than men. Thus, while women made up 37% of the students taking physics in U.S. high schools in 1988, only 22% of those taking the calculus-based introductory physics course in college were women (AIP, 1988, 1991). Women's presence is reduced to 15% of those receiving the bachelor's degree in physics and then to 10% of the share of Ph.D.s. The decline continues in the shift from education to academic employment, with women constituting 7% of assistant professors of physics and only about 3% of full professors.

What are the effects of such small numbers on the women who persist in scientific careers? A key finding in our interviews was that as the number of women faculty members in a department increased, they divided into distinct subgroups that could be at odds with each other. Senior female scientists typically shared the values and workstyles of older men; their narrow focus failed to meet the needs of most younger women. In contrast, some younger women (and a few men) struggled to create an alternative scientific role, balancing work and non-work issues. The scientific role thus divides along generational and gender fault lines. These developments have significant unintended consequences for the socialization of female scientists – for example, the availability of relevant role models.

The strong effect of culturally defined gender roles persists in science and other traditionally male professions through the social meanings attached to gender. Rather than a fluid perspective of human attributes that can be held by members of either sex, behavioral characteristics are frequently presumed to be innate and immutably ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in the same way as one's biology.

The thesis that science is masculine, with ‘masculine’ understood as a cultural rather than as a biological term, ties issues of women in science to broader questions of gender roles and how they are culturally defined and transmitted from birth (Ruskai, 1990; Hyde, 1994). As Howell (private communication) points out, ‘Sex, which is concrete and universal, specifies no role whatsoever.’ Rather, it is cultural prescriptions and proscriptions, delineating which behaviors are appropriate to one sex and not the other, that creates the ‘psychological meaning’ of what it is to be male and female.

Thus gender as a concept was created to understand ‘the social quality of distinctions between the sexes … for the explicit purpose of creating a space in which socially mediated differences can be explored apart from biological differences’ (Hare-Mustin and Maracek, 1988). However, the concepts of sex and gender become easily entwined and socialization becomes confused with biology. Taking this a step further, ' … it would be illogical to say that being male or female would, in itself, make someone a good or bad scientist.

Two scientific worlds, one male, the other female, emerge from the faculty interviews. These dualities were expressed in the key moments of an academic science career such as setting up a lab and preparing for the tenure decision. The question of how to act as an advisor to female graduate students was also fraught with tension. With respect to these various issues, the female experience in academic science was typically far more difficult in contrast to the well-connected male. Lacking a satisfactory conduit for information, a junior faculty woman reported that she and her peers would ‘sit and discuss for hours and hours what to do, then we walk away not knowing if we should do it because we are too young. We are brand new in this department and we don't know if that is the way to do it.’. Even having peers did not necessarily help, for they were equally clueless.

For others, the separate and unequal experience was one of invisibility and denied professional identity. A new woman faculty member may be mistaken for a secretary, student, or technician by hostile older men, or considered inauthentic: ‘I really don't know what they think [about me] because I interact with them so rarely. I mean I'm the only woman among 42 faculty members, so they don't know what to make of me, period. Most of the faculty here are used to treating women as wives and secretaries, or both.’

In this chapter we discuss the ‘pipeline’ thesis for improving women's participation in science. This ‘supply side’ approach assumes that if sufficient women are encouraged to enter the scientific and engineering professions, the gender gap in science and technology will disappear.

The scientific career track, from elementary school to initial employment, has been depicted as a ‘pipeline’ like those for the transport of fluids and gases such as water, oil or natural gas. The rate of flow into scientific careers is measured by passage through transition points in the pipeline such as graduation and continuation to the next educational level.

Nevertheless, the flow of women into science is through, ‘a pipe with leaks at every joint along its span, a pipe that begins with a high-pressure surge of young women at the source – a roiling Amazon of smart graduate students – and ends at the spigot with a trickle of women prominent enough to be deans or department heads at major universities or to win such honours as membership in the National Academy of Science or even, heaven forfend, the Nobel Prize’ (Angier, 1995). Even this negative depiction of the pipeline as a leaky vessel is too optimistic. As we shall see, many women are discouraged from pursuing their scientific interests far earlier in their educational career than graduate training.

Although the rate of women entering scientific professions has improved significantly, especially in the biological sciences, the numbers reaching high-level positions are much smaller than expected.

Athena, the Greek mythological figure with strong female and male elements in her identity, personifies the dilemma of the contemporary female scientist. Contemporary female scientists are expected, and often expect themselves, to combine a demanding personal and professional life, without its effects on either. Even as some female scientists struggle to balance their professional and personal lives, others continue or are constrained to comply with a traditional ‘male model’ that rigidly subordinates the personal to the professional. Women in science comprise a diverse set of persons who, despite a common gender, do not embrace a collective identity.

Many successful women in scientific and engineering professions expect to have crossed a threshold into a work life in which gender is irrelevant. These fortunate few females are taken on as apprentices and, encouraged by their undergraduate professors, enter graduate school in the sciences and engineering. There again, they encounter an opaque competitive system that typically depletes their self-confidence.

Those women who complete the Ph.D. face a series of career choices that often needlessly clash with personal aspirations. As Athena found in pursuing her adventures as a woman in a higher world dominated by a male ethos, gender matters.

Alternate competing theses have been suggested to explain the resistance to women in science. It is not ‘either/or’. Rather than ‘barriers to entry’, visible and invisible impediments to women pursuing a scientific career, or a ‘glass ceiling’ that places limits on recognition of achievement, difficulties exist at all stages and phases of the scientific career line.

Elite male participants in a cultural complex extending from the Kwakiutl Native American communities in the Pacific Northwest to the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific regularly meet to give away their most prized possessions to each other. The more material goods an individual gives away, the higher their social status and the more secure their standing within the group. This pattern of social relations, called the ‘kula ring’ in Melanesia and the ‘potlatch’ in North America, provides an informal means of organizing and redistributing resources and power in the community (Drucker and Heizer, 1967). ‘And it is just through this exchange, through their being constantly within reach and the object of competitive desire, through being the means of arousing envy and conferring social distinction and renown, that these objects attain their high value’ (Malinowski, 1922: 511).

Conducted at regular intervals, the kula ring has its analog in the way scientists exchange ideas, resources, and information. Like gatherings of Melanesian clan leaders, elite scientists who are linked by ongoing networks of relations and governed by norms of trust and reciprocity ritualistically meet to discuss collaborations, discover complementary areas of research, and introduce their graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to each other for future correspondence and employment.

Even members of the same department may experience the scientific world quite differently, depending on the configuration of their social networks.

This chapter provides descriptions of the classes of interventions – top down, bottom up, and idiosyncratic – that occur in academic departments attempting to bring about gender equality. We analyze the pros and cons of each of these types of intervention. Our proposal is to help administrators and policy analysts understand what kinds of interventions, given their limitations and advantages, bring about the best outcomes under different circumstances. Later in this chapter, we explain in detail how departments can use specific practices to change, develop, or enhance these interventions through task redesign, social networks, or university-industry relationships.

To study programs systematically, we delineated four groups of departments in each of the five target disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, computer science and electrical engineering. The first group of departments had initiated programs whose stated objective was to be more inclusive of women. The other three groups were delineated on the basis of outcomes, as recorded by the National Research Council's (NRC) annual compilation of doctoral degrees granted. In each of the five fields for the decade-and-a-half up through 1990, we selected the ten departments that had graduated the highest proportion of female doctorates, the ten that had graduated the lowest, and the ten that showed the most improvement in women's graduation rate across that period. We then selected the two departments from each group that displayed the most consistent numbers and trends.

Overlying the differences between the male and female scientific worlds is another split, one within the female realm, that mirrors and refracts the larger gender division. Women scientists' perception of the obstacles in their path, and their response to them, create two dichotomous camps. One group is predominantly made up of an older generation of resilient women who stress a highly competitive, individualistic style that mirrors the traditional male stereotype. In contrast, younger up-and-coming junior and newly tenured women faculty members emphasize a more relational, collaborative approach within their research groups. We call the first group of women ‘instrumentals’, and the second ‘relationals’, reflecting their respective work styles. Notwithstanding such important differences, women faculty members who have thrived appear to have in common two significant characteristics. Firstly, they all identify sufficiently positive relationships with their own graduate school advisors as crucial to their past and present level of self-confidence, perseverance, and success. Secondly, although each is influenced by their own perception of a scientific style, all of these dedicated women labor to interpret an appropriate role as advisor to their female students.

Inescapable tensions exist for all successful women scientists, regardless of personal philosophy, around the role of advisor. The perceptions, attitudes and values which comprise a ‘style’ of advising and doing science are frequently a product of, or a response to, an earlier powerful relationship with one's mentor.

Graduate education is not a smooth continuum, with a steady rate of ‘leakage’ from the pipeline, but rather a discontinuous, turbulent flow, with attrition rates rising at certain key junctures (NSF, 1994). We have identified several specific points in the career trajectory when people are propelled forward, pushed out, or dropped down to a lower level. We call these points ‘critical transitions’. At the Ph.D. level these transitions are likely to include: (1) the qualifying examination, (2) finding a research advisor, (3) negotiating a dissertation topic, and (4) deciding what is sufficient work for the granting of the degree. Academic transition points sometimes coincide with events in the course of a life time that affect how decisions are made. Thus, for example, a student who is pregnant might have difficulty in finding an advisor, if decision makers view child-rearing and research as inherently incompatible.

The most crucial transition in the experimental sciences is the one from being a student in courses to becoming part of a research environment. A female graduate student described it as an apprenticeship: ‘You learn the part of being a physicist through interaction with other physicists.’ However, a belief permeates many departments, and is transmitted to incoming female students, that their admission is based on affirmative action rather than merit. Female students’ self-confidence is eroded by the attitude of faculty and male peers that women are less competent than men.